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Abortion and the Moral Significance of Merely Possible Persons

Finding Middle Ground in Hard Cases

  • Book
  • © 2010

Overview

Authors:
  1. Melinda A. Roberts

    1. Dept. Philosophy & Religion, College of New Jersey, Ewing, USA

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  • Explores whether our moral obligation is to make "happy people," as Narveson put it, or to make "people happy"
  • Describes a form of consequentialism tempered by deontological principle
  • Introduces lawyers and philosophers working in applied ethics to the issues in moral theory, population ethics and social choice theory
  • Concludes with concrete results that will be both controversial and (relatively) straightforward, modest and non-doctrinal
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Philosophy and Medicine (PHME, volume 107)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages I-VIII
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  2. Introduction

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 1-40

  3. The Moral Significance of Merely Possible Persons

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 41-92

  4. The Abortion Paradox

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 93-119

  5. Three More Arguments Against Early Abortion

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 121-143

  6. Abortion and Variabilism

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 145-164

  7. Conclusion

    • Melinda A. Roberts
    Pages 165-166

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 167-189
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Keywords

About this book

1.1 Goals 1.1.1 I have two main goals in this book. The first is to give an account of the moral significance of merely possible persons – persons who, relative to a particular 1 circumstance, or possible future or world, could but in fact never do exist. I call that account Variabilism. My second goal is to use Variabilism to begin to address the problem of abortion. 1.1.2 We ought to do the best we can for people. And we consider this obligation to extend to people who are, relative to a world, existing or future. But does it extend to merely possible people as well? And, if it does, then does it extend to making things better for them by way of bringing them into existence? If we say that surely it doesn’t, does that then mean that our obligation to do the best we can for people does not, after all, extend to the merely possible – that the merely p- sible do not matter morally? But if the merely possible do not matter morally, then doesn’t that mean that it would be permissible for us to bring them into miserable existences – and even obligatory to do just that – in the case where bringing the merely possible into miserable existences creates additional wellbeing for existing 1 References to merely possible persons and, later on, to persons who do exist – existing persons

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dept. Philosophy & Religion, College of New Jersey, Ewing, USA

    Melinda A. Roberts

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